His Dark Materials season 3 will get “down and dirty,” with “a lot of fisticuffs”

For the past couple years, HBO has been adapting Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, finally giving this bold fantasy tale quality screen treatment it deserves. They’re already done with The Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, so now it’s onto the third and final book in the trilogy: The Amber Spyglass.

James McAvoy, who plays the ambitious Lord Asriel, isn’t revealing much in the way of specifics, but said what he could during an appearance on The One Show the other day. “Yeah, really good…” he said when asked how production was coming along. “What can I tell you? It’s war. At the end of the second season we sort of declare war on the Kingdom of Heaven, so yeah it gets pretty down and dirty, and there’s gonna be a lot of fisticuffs and a lot of explosions and all that stuff.”

Indeed, the last thing we saw Lord Asriel do is call upon disaffected angels in his war on the Authority, which is basically this universe’s version of God. The third book is the biggest, boldest and most action-packed, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing if HBO can pull off all the levels.

When does His Dark Materials premiere on HBO?

While Asriel is busy fighting god, the actual main characters — Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen) and Will Parry (Amir Wilson) — are off to the side, dealing with crises of their own. But Asriel disregards them at his peril, since they’re crucial to how the story resolves. “But at its heart it’s about a wee girl and a wee boy,” McAvoy said, “and not the adults with the egos.”

There’s no release date His Dark Materials season 3 as of yet, but look for it sometime in 2022.

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h/t Digital Spy